A Marriage at Sea: A True Story of Love, Obsession, and Shipwreck
By Sophie Elmhirst
Riverhead Books
Even the happiest of marriages would be severely tested by floating on a life raft in the middle of the Pacific Ocean without food or any means of communication for weeks on end.
That’s what Maurice and Maralyn Bailey experienced in 1973, after an injured sperm whale crashed into and sank the Auralyn, the English couple’s 31-foot yacht. The pair's unlikely survival is the basis for Sophie Elmhirst’s “A Marriage at Sea: A True Story of Love, Obsession, and Shipwreck,” which has (ahem) made waves with critics and readers since its July release.
The Baileys had married in 1963. After a few years of “regular life” in a sleepy town, they'd decided to work toward buying a boat in order to sail around the world and emigrate to New Zealand.
In 1972, the pair sold their home and began their journey, visiting Spain, Portugal, and the Canary Islands before crossing the Atlantic and sailing through the Panama Canal, with the aim of next visiting the Galápagos Islands. Their unexpected collision with the whale, on March 4, 1973, shifted the couple’s focus to basic survival.
Elmhirst – a journalist who knows this dramatic account is the most irresistible hook (sorry!) in her arsenal – brings this turning point alive in her prose twice, beginning the book with it before filling us in on Maurice’s and Maralyn’s personal history, their courtship, and the journey that precedes the accident.
In that moment the couple raced to pack supplies and tools in their inflatable dinghy and their life raft: “Around them floated items that had sprung from Auralyn as she sank. Maurice, rowing the dinghy, retrieved what he could: four containers of water, one of kerosene, one of methylated spirits, a jar of Coffee-Mate, a tin of margarine, two pencils. Her last offerings. After it was all stowed, he attached the dinghy to the raft with two twenty-five-foot lines. … At last, the two craft, like prisoners, were tied together. Maurice rested for a moment. He looked across at Maralyn and saw that she was weeping.”
This passage is notable in part because Maralyn – nearly a decade Maurice's junior and far more optimistic – has a rare moment of panic, though she’s otherwise, by Maurice’s and Elmhirst’s account, an irrepressible, unflappable force that keeps the pair afloat (apologies!): “If they were strict, she estimated that they could stretch the food to last for about twenty days, which sounded like a very long time to be stuck on a raft in the middle of an ocean. Still, Maralyn was optimistic. She knew the Galápagos were close. Maurice, who knew more about the winds and currents, didn’t tell her how unlikely it was that they’d be blown in the right direction. He found himself wondering if they had enough gas in the canister to kill themselves.”
Elmhirst, a skilled narrator, uses rich sensory detail to put the reader in the couple’s place. For example, as the pair try to sleep during their first uncomfortable, adrenaline-charged night on the raft, Elmhirst tells us, “On Auralyn, the ocean had been tempered by the hard wood of the hull and the rigid surface of a bunk. Now the water swelled beneath a layer of fabric, the kind of movement against which muscles, which long to forget themselves, start to brace. Unsupported, their bodies registered each rise and fall, the insecurity of every wave.”
This passage makes me shudder every time I read it.
The tales that follow – the seven ships that Maurice and Maralyn (unsuccessfully) try to flag down over four months; the small sharks Maralyn starts to yank out of the water by hand to eat; the foul water they both have no choice but to drink; their attempts to fish, with hooks made from safety pins, during rollicking storms; constantly bailing out and re-inflating the craft, which are gradually becoming more and more damaged – are harrowing and relentless, until a South Korean fishing boat finally spots the couple and invites them to come aboard.
After the malnourished couple begins to recover, what follows, perhaps predictably, is a media circus. Maurice and Maralyn travel to tell their story to the press in different countries and then release a book – called “117 days” (though a fussy editor’s note clarifies that the period was actually a little over 118 days) – that draws from the logs and diaries both Maurice and Maralyn kept during their terrifying adventure.
To everyone's shock, the couple soon decide to put their money toward building a new boat, the Auralyn II, to sail to Patagonia – with a small crew this time.
The trip’s launch is a dud, complete with terrible weather, but everyone plays their part, and the boat eventually starts on its way. (The Baileys wrote a second book about the trip, but as Elmhirst wryly notes, a successful journey is a far less enticing book subject than a shipwreck.) Then, in a short section set apart from the rest of the narrative, Elmhirst compares the sendoff and subsequent trip to a wedding and marriage: “After the wedding, after the honeymoon – well, then it’s just days. Ordinary days. The insurmountable, self-renewing chores. The bins, the laundry, the procession of meals. And those are the golden days, it turns out. The blissful, boring days that you long for when things go wrong. … Somewhere, deep within, unspoken, we must know, we do know, that we’ll all have our time adrift. For what else is a marriage, really, if not being stuck on a small raft with someone and trying to survive?”
I must confess that the book’s title – and the placement of this brief aside, which zooms out to articulate the challenges of living the day-in, day-out routine that most marriages inevitably settle into – led me to believe that we were heading toward a complicated ending for Maralyn and Maurice or, at the very least, a significant, surprising shift in their behavior or thinking.
But that's not where we land, so I felt a little let down and misled by the concluding chapters of "Marriage at Sea." Yes, I'd enjoyed the rollicking ride, and I found the Baileys' survival tactics creative and remarkable. But don't we read these accounts to learn what those involved learned about themselves, or life, after engaging in a prolonged staring contest with Death?
Maurice came home knowing what he likely understood before he'd left: "Had he been alone on the ocean, he would have given up."
